Working Out On Keto

Having a tough time putting on muscle on the keto diet? Does working out on the keto diet even make sense? It makes sense, but you need to make sure you are taking the correct steps to get to your end goal of lifting/working out on keto. Let’s get right into it!

Getting Started

During the first phase on the ketogenic diet when you’re first getting into ketosis, I would recommend just doing some easy cardio.

Don’t go crazy on your workouts, keep your intensity under sixty percent. This is for a couple of reasons. For one, you’re adjusting to a new energy pathway and your body’s not efficient at it yet. You could end up finding yourself feeling weaker and feeling lethargic.

Also, you could just mess with your head because your performance is going to temporarily decline. There are studies that show in the very early parts of ketosis, like the first four or five days, you end up having a decline in performance. and this is simply because your body hasn’t adapted to any one way yet. You’re reducing one fuel, the carbs, that it’s used to but it’s not used to using the next fuel, the fats. So it’s kind of in that gray area again, so recommend just keeping the workouts nice and easy.

There’s no way that you’re going to be able to really work out and get yourself into ketosis faster…. I mean there are but they’re more advanced and let’s not really worry about it yet. I will have a post in the future about speeding up getting your body into ketosis. Just for that first week, keep your workouts nice and easy.

How To Workout Once You Are In Ketosis

What you want to be doing after you’ve been through the first week of ketosis, if you really want to work out the way that you normally would, I highly recommend working out in a fasted state.

If you work out in a fasted state first thing in the morning or just fasted in general the body doesn’t have the dietary fat coming in, so it pulls the fat from your actual stores for fuel therefore you’re going to be able to burn fat a lot faster Fasted cardio and fasted workouts are very powerful in the morning.

Becoming Dual Fueled On Keto

Now the Journal of Metabolism actually published a study that found that even when you’re on the ketogenic diet, your body still uses carbs for fuel, how does this even work? Well the body still finds a way to create carbs whether it’s from protein or again from carbs that you consume small amounts of. 

When you’re exercising, you create lactate, we will call it an exhaust from your exercise. Now, your body can take that exhaust and it can process it through a cycle that actually creates “artificial” carbohydrates for your body to use. They’re not really “artificial” they are truly are carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen which make them a true carbohydrate.

When you’re on a keto diet this process becomes very efficient and gives your body the ability to  use glucose, carbs, and fats for fuel, this is called being “dual fueled.”

So, when you’re in ketosis you have a unique ability to be able to burn fat and carbs at essentially the same time.

Weightloss/workout tip: When you’re doing low intensity activity, your body usually uses fats, when you’re doing high intensity activity your body usually utilizes carbohydrates.

It’s very hard to shift gears one or the other as fuel sources, but on the keto diet you have the unique ability to burn both at the same time. It’s one of the only times you could actually go for a long run and then come back and do some heavy workout or heavy squats or resistance training and still be able to perform relatively well.

Believe it or not, your carbohydrate utilization is about the same on a keto diet than it is on a non keto diet. You’re just getting your carbs from a different means. This should help clear the myth about performance on keto.

Final Thoughts

I will say that you might see a small performance decline in terms of your heavy-heavy lifts and that’s simply because your body is not quite as efficient at using the carbs as it would be if it was just directly being fed them….but are you in this for a performance increase when it comes to weights, or are you doing keto to be the best possible version of yourself? THat’s a question you will have to ask yourself.